Of course, you know Chris Brennan has gone. A man so deeply rooted in the world couldn’t die easily. From desolate lodgings he was carried to the hospital, where he denied himself to his friends… asked for a priest… confessed his sins… took the crucifix in his hand, and expired. Some of his intimates are hushing up the story.
Hugh McCrae to Nettie Palmer, 4 November 1932.
Desolate lodgings… Poor old Brennan. Much better to die young like Michael Dransfield, on Good Friday no less, probably from a drug overdose, which pickled his reputation for a while. Heroin, motor bikes, mad houses, the publishers smelt cult following. A collection of posthumous verse led the cavalcade, followed by a collected works and finally a huge biography of the adolescent poet, although it didn’t generate a reprint run. In time we’ll forget Dransfield as well. We suffer from a special form of literary dementia in this country.
Dransfield tracked an earlier, lesser known hippy trail than the road to Nimbin. He followed his friend, the environmentalist John Blay, out of Balmain in the late 1960s to Umbi Gumbi, a bush block near Bermagui. Later Blay talked about the poet and the period in his bush memoir Part of the Scenery, giving context to the poetry, making sense of Dransfield’s line: ‘A larger house is needed for illusions’ (‘Birthday Ballad, Courland Penders’). Blay shows us Dransfield dressed in a 'clean white kaftan' touring Bega’s stock and station agents in search of Courland Penders, his mythical family estate and recurrent subject of the poetry. There was method in the mania. The run-down cottages Dransfield bought in the hinterland towns of Cobargo and Candelo grew in his imagination into mansions large enough to accommodate delusions, still, he made a tidy sum from real estate.
Dorothy Hewett was another poet who spent time at Umbi Gumbi; who drew on the district and its writers for inspiration. Dransfield is the starting point of her weird Gothic novel Neap Tide when a middle aged female academic writing a book on Australian Romantic poetry, from Brennan to Dransfield, turns up in the fishing village of Zane and is subjected to all manner of hauntings. Named after Zane Grey, the American pulp fiction writer and deep sea fisherman, who put Bermagui on the map in the 1930s, Zane is a microcosm of late twentieth century anxiety: AIDS, the environment and white guilt for the atrocities committed against the First Nations People.
Hewett, born in 1923, still channelled the social realist doctrine that art was a vehicle for politics (again fashionable), although the novel’s marriage with the anxious genre of Gothic, in which the oppressed traditionally haunt the Ascendancy, or settlers, is more problematic. As Indigenous novelist Tony Birch said recently, the Gothic is a cliché. Its’s annoying. He isn’t ‘interested in some white person’s melancholia or their sense of being haunted.’*
Hewett’s white writers in Neap Tide are all haunted, angst earnestly about guilt at every turn. Her models are easily recognised. The novelist and poet Rodney Hall at work, writing The Grisly Wife worrying at our history, pompous, soured by neglect, on the point of winning the Miles Franklin; or righteous John Blay writing his environmental memoir Part of the Scenery in a tent by a dam. Others, she transposes to the far south coast, like her lustful portrait of Black activist and poet Kevin Gilbert. Notably her writers are all men.
Inside Neap Tide’s roller coaster plot, Dransfield as subject goes missing. The young poet was no fool. He’d predicted his inevitable fall into obscurity in Birthday Ballad’s further lines:
a needle spelling XANADU
in pinprick visions down your arm
what of nostalgia when
the era that you grew with dies
How do you explain Dransfield’s correspondence with Coleridge, Mallarmé, Rimbaud to people who don’t read poetry? Neap Tide’s bland academic simply gives up, her focus shifting from romantic poetry to crime novels, popular fiction, cultural studies. Hewett, who made a decisive cross over from poetry to fiction in the early 1990s, was making a point. Bad enough that Lit students don’t read poetry, but when academics paid money can’t be bothered the era and the form is dead.
Dransfield’s search for utopia is best left in the 1970s, when hippies briefly colonised NSW’s far south coast. While there’s nothing as grand as Couland Penders fallen into ruin, the district is an archaeological dig of the abandoned communes and collectives that once stretched from Eden to the backblocks of Moruya. Hall makes oblique reference to this parallel society in The Grisly Wife, with his fanatical 19th century Christian cult that settle in the bush, a novel which resonates with the bizarre cults of the 1970s , such as the followers of the guru Bhagwan who populated the region.
The town Eden - paradise on earth - carries weighty expectations. Post-war romantic Arthur Boyd came looking for the ark and painted his Boat Builders there. Blay’s glimpse into Utopian dreaming is more sardonic. Utopia is a local place name that exists on the map, although he thinks those 19th century pioneers had a dark sense of humour. The soil is inarable. Nothing but eucalypts and marijuana grows, as many a scurvy-ridden hippy found out to their cost. The story is bigger, crazier than Blay tells, nonetheless his rare record of the 12 couples setting up Two Creeks, west of Eden, a colony of architects, musicians and rich city kids, which predated Nimbin, makes his book important. As for images, you can still find the odd picture of a tree house or a dome, Gothically reclaimed by bush, on lands sold (for exorbitant prices) on realestate.com.
Those 1970s romantics sure had a nose for real estate.
*Adelle Sefton-Rowston, ‘You’ll be great, but only if you work your arse off.’ An interview with Tony Birch’, Overland, March 2017.
- J.G.